It is your proof to yourself that you are, wrapped up in a sly submission to your peers for validation. Taking your own picture is a hilarious act fraught with existential dilemma. Only we would take pictures of ourselves as the world is collapsing. Hopefully, someone will tell us that we look like we are having fun. Put on our best tempered smirks, crane our phones at an improbable angle. Selfies tear off the veil: man or woman, young, old, or somewhere in-between, we’re all that teenage girl. I was trying to take a picture of my new shoes for a friend. I got completely shamed by two children, and rightly so, because I was acting like a teenage girl. “I get that it’s a nice phone, but come on,” the other said. “Hello!” the tall one shouted, in my face. Yesterday, I nearly walked right into two ten year-old boys on the street. His are the selfies of the early-20s European vacation. One can barely blame him for the need to document his presence therein: otherwise no one would believe that he’d seen such things at all. Set within Wind Waker’s cheery cosmos, Link comes across as a traveler, happening upon expansive washes of picturesque scenery. Link’s selfies, on the other hand, own this sense of girlish playfulness. The idea of Trevor, Michael and Franklin hashtagging their pictures is even more comical: #ThereAreLevelstoThis #Lucky #Reckless #Balling #IWouldHateMeToo #YouOnlyLiveOnce. There is something sweet about these men submitting to the comically girlish impulse of a selfie.
Michael’s selfie expressions are most priceless of all: wide-eyed and confused, lips parted in a weird half-smile, lines under his eyes and striping his forehead, he stands in a tuxedo, with nowhere to go and no one to spend time with. Selfies in which he is out of character and off-kilter (like Trevor) make less sense, because they don’t fit our idea of him. He is poker-faced, inscrutable, possibly wondering at his own good luck. Where anything goes for Trevor, Franklin’s selfies are usually taken before his classic cars, on the deck of his art magazine-worthy home, sometimes in front of the strip club.
Or here, immovable in front of a gas station, swallowed in flower bursts of flame. Or here, to immortalize his sinewy body in his skivvies, framed by a lightning storm, one of his eyes just slightly crossed. He angles his phone perfectly to catch the pink mountain sunset bathing his craggy face, a burning plane jettisoning across the sky. His world-the Fear and Loathing in Los Santos world we imagine for him-is made and remade through each selfie. Players realize Trevor when they capture him scowling in front of a blowup doll, or before three police men shouting at him to stop taking a goddamn selfie and get down on the goddamn ground. And each time we take a photo of ourselves, we expand the meaning of what it is to be one of these men. We hold a flexible idea in our minds of what they’d do on a normal weekday, where they’d go. We imagine the kind of lives they lead, and the limits around them. They aren’t static, bound by lore books or intractable backstory. There are levels to this process of coming into our own as these three. Nowhere am I Trevor, Franklin and Michael as perfectly as when I am taking a selfie as them. The in-game selfie is really about the obscene action happening in the background. Scrolling through the thousands of selfies that players have taken across the Los Santos mini-verse (posted on the Rockstar Games Social Club site), I was struck by how dead-on players are in their authoring. The pairing of your wide-eyed face with that action has to be believable. In GTAV, in particular, your selfie works best if the scene you capture makes sense given how we imagine these men. It’s not enough to just get a flattering angle on yourself as Link, Michael, Franklin or Trevor. Taking a successful selfie in a game, like Wind Waker HD or Grand Theft Auto V, is also an art form, with added constraints. Taking a good, nonchalant selfie, I learned, is truly an art form.
I found pages filled with self-portraits: my friends in media res as eager, thoughtful people living active and seemingly happy lives. I downloaded Instagram for the first time a couple of months ago, wanting to see the feeds of my friends.